Someone tell Uefa racism is not an English disease

Angel Maria Villar Llona's crowd-silencing speech to Uefa's anti-racism conference wasn't hard to see coming. Llona's day job is head of Spain's La Liga, home of the fastest-growing racism problem in European football. His simple message to delegates? Racism's no big thing, he said: 'Why blow it all up, why make a mountain out of a molehill?'

The issues here - the cause and effect - aren't hard to spot. What was more shocking was Uefa's response to Llona's attitude. Challenged by this paper, communications director William Gaillard first refused to condemn Llona, then revealed he'd helped with the speech, and added this for effect: 'I wouldn't say Spain is more racist than England.'

Feel like we've been here before? European football is mired in stunningly extreme racism, unimaginable here - Italians hanging swastikas in Rome's Olympic stadium - yet Uefa again use England as an easy diversion, as they did post-Heysel when everything was blamed on 'the English disease'. Let's be clear: Gaillard has openly slandered our game in a way that undermines the successes of the last 30 years and sends out a totally inaccurate message to non-white communities in this country. So far, the FA's response has been silence.

Our approach has to change. We can't afford to be shy about England's record on racism, nervous that bigging ourselves up equals Llona-style complacency. Racism hasn't gone from our game, but in the past five years incidents have fallen away and I've heard nothing racist first-hand. Palace, like many clubs, are in a multiracial area with a multiracial fanbase and staff. If I thought we had a problem, I'd be all over it.

The rare crowd incidents we have had in my time have never been about anything worse than over-stimulated morons. Millwall fans ripping out toilets, a group of fans fighting on the pitch. And even small-scale incidents like these are rare because of the way we confront them, because clubs like mine pay £250,000 a year for policing - our biggest expense after salaries.

It's worth noting, too, that this original 'English disease' hasn't shown up in any big way here since the Millwall v Birmingham play-off in 2002. I was there as a guest of Theo Paphitis: my car was attacked on the way out of the ground when Millwall people saw who was in it, police were hit with bricks and petrol bombs, police horses set on fire. A hundred officers were injured: it was grotesque, but the response to it was effective and decisive. Police prosecuted 82 men over the following three years, leading to 100 years' worth of jail time and 400 years of banning orders, and Theo brought in a photo ID system.

Nothing like it has happened here since. Compare that to what goes on now in Germany, in Italy, and to last week's pre-match baseball-bat battle in Holland between fans from Den Haag and Ajax, and you realise just how much we need to stand up for our record.

That goes as well for the charges of an underlying, institutional racism still being made against those who run England's top clubs. Paul Davis suggested three years ago that he was precluded from opportunities in management because of his colour. Ian Wright, a friend of mine, agreed. He refused to take his FA coaching badges, saying 'When the FA asked me I thought, "What's the point?"'

I told Ian at the time I was disappointed with what he'd said. The truth is much less sensational: like the majority of chairmen, I've never had an application from a black manager. There's one non-white manager working in League football - Keith Alexander at Lincoln. Leroy Rosenior recently left Torquay with the club second from bottom of League Two, and Keith Curle was sacked by Chester last night. The top-level candidates just aren't there.

I asked Ian if he thought, by extension, that the lack of Asian players at Palace, despite the large British Asian population in Croydon, was institutional racism too. It's a total nonsense. Colour has nothing to do with recruitment: clubs want talent from the widest pool possible. And if these outdated allegations of 'closed-shop' institutional racism put them off even trying, it becomes a stupid, self-fulfilling prophecy.

English football has changed massively, and yes, we have to keep the momentum going. Efforts to encourage more non-white fans into grounds have to increase, and all fans need to feel more confident about reporting incidents of racist or, increasingly now, homophobic abuse. But all this progress counts for nothing if we're not prepared to shout about it, to promote the game's accessibility.

The challenge for Uefa now is twofold. Italy and Spain, 20-odd mental years behind us, need a basic, elevated deterrent: serious financial penalties, point deductions, suspensions from competitions. Roma have had their second one-match home-game ban in two years - playing in an empty, neutral venue - and that's a start.

But part two of the challenge is this. Uefa need to back off from their lazy, ignorant, reflex prejudice against England, and actively hold the English model up as an example to the rest of Europe. And because, led by Llona and Gaillard, none of that is likely to occur to them naturally, they need forcing.

It's not in our FA's nature to be aggressive in the right direction, but they have to own this issue, stand up for our record, for the progress made here. They need to take some pride in how far we've come, and bloody well fight for our reputation.

Basically, it's going brilliantly. And why wouldn't it, led by this self-selected FA executive panel of Barwick, White, and Richards - the man who made Sheffield Wednesday what they are today? However you look at this panel, this process, it's totally backward: how can you select the right manager if the wrong people are doing the choosing? What is it that equips these men to lead this process? Where's the FA's director of football Trevor Brooking, or one of the two ex-managers to have taken us to tournament semi-finals, Robson or Venables? Why is the FA council also so hands on, and why are they all leaking to the press in different directions?

All things considered, there's nothing I could ever do or say that could sum up the FA better than the first 17 days of this process.

The headline embarrassment is the FA's failure, again, to spot that public and tabloid opinion has a proven track record of being totally worthless when it comes to appointing England managers. And this latest campaign for an 'English' England manager is more obviously stupid than anything that's gone before. But they've bought it: we're seeing grown adults arguing about how 'English' Martin O'Neill is; highly paid executives following this British Bulldog bullshit that a patriotic 'English' coach will somehow be genetically more loyal, more dedicated, less randy and less likely to listen to job offers from Chelsea.

Barwick has to get a grip. The panel - if they stay as they are - need to do four things. They must accept that this job demands the best available candidate, not the most 'English' one. They must show some dignity and stop briefing journalists about every twist and fart. They must make it clear the new coach won't be announced until after the World Cup: Sven doesn't need to be further undermined by a tabloid push for the new man to have a role. And then they need to work out what they are looking for, not who.

The checklist should be obvious: leadership, credibility, confidence, experience of winning as a manager at the top level and experience of managing the biggest egos and the biggest expectations. None of the leaked 'English' names tick more than half those boxes. Curbishley and Allardyce have done fantastic jobs for their clubs, but experience of the top, of coping with expectation? And yes, O'Neill's won the Scottish title with Celtic, but then so could I.

The key point is this: we can't know whether the best available candidate, the most qualified, happens to be English until we've trawled the world, thrown the process open to include Felipe Scolari, Guus Hiddink and every other worldwide option. This needs months, not weeks. We need to motivate the coach with a performance-related contract, we need to know about technique, ambition, and what each applicant plans to do for the game. Will he re-form an England B team, change the coaching structure, re-energise English football from the core outwards?

The panel's choice is either to look for the best man and appoint him at the right time, or say sod it, go patriotic and give the job to Dave Whelan. And if that's still too hard a decision, why not just ask Chelsea for advice, a club with the choice of any manager in the world? Jose Mourinho didn't have an in-built bulldog passion for Chelsea, but he does have a passion for winning: they appointed him because he was the best man for the job. So why shouldn't our country do the same?